Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plot is mainly an excuse for a series of monologues. Two people who want to be tenants of the same barren apartment meet in it. They gradually spill out their past lives, the failures of their marriages, and their desires for companionship. If Last Tango in Paris without sex is imaginable, this is it. But a third woman is always present and the two potential roommates are in their late fifties, maybe eighties. Both are women and there's no sex in the whole thing except for the various tales of use and misuse at husbands' hands...
When the curtain first rises, you are plunged into a thickly tangled plot that may take you the whole first act to unravel. Basically, the main character is not really the medieval German emperor, (sigh of relief from those who hate historical plays), but a twentieth-century Italian aristocrat who suffered a fall from his horse during a mock-medieval pageant and remained convinced that he was actually Henry IV. In order to humor him, his relatives have totally recreated Henry's courts, with servants in medieval dress, oil lamps instead of electric lights, visiting abbots and monks--the works...
...Jamaican feature, and it gives a view of the island-shabby houses, tense little nightclubs and baked-out countryside-that is not part of the standard paradise tour. For all its naive charm, the movie is not consistently successful. Its crudities of characterization and carelessness about certain matters of plot give it a kind of jerry-built look. But The Harder They Come is always exuberant, and sometimes strong, as casually surprising and effortlessly sinister as the blade sliding out of a gravity knife. - Jay Cocks
...Brooklyn named McCoy, who is hired by a rich businessman to recover some stolen diamonds. The whole business is pretty shady, and McCoy gets roughed up or punched out in every scene where he is not bantering with or bedding a society type (Dyan Cannon) from Sutton Place. The plot makes no sense, although it tries. It all ends with one of those tenuous solutions that raise more questions than they actually answer...
...novel's situation-it is too static to be called a plot-seems better suited to one of Harold Robbins' meat operas than to the work of a man who once won the National Book Award (for Steps) and who is now a professor of prose and criticism at Yale. Kosinski's hero, Jonathan Whalen, is sole heir to one of the nation's great industrial fortunes, and to a remarkably ordinary set of psychological wounds. Whalen's father, a tycoon now dead, gave his son insufficient attention, and seems thereby to be the villain...